Steve Vanderheiden
Biographic Data
| ID | 374807 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Steve Vanderheiden |
| GIVEN NAMES | Steve |
| FAMILY NAME | Vanderheiden |
| SIGNATURE | VANDERHEIDEN S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Colorado Boulder |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8838-2178 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 81 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Incorporating Equitable Carbon Access Into Carbon Taxes
As climate change mitigation measures, carbon taxes ought to assign the burdens associated with decarbonization equitably and should at least aim to avoid perpetuating wide inequities in carbon access. While several popular carbon taxation schemes incorporate "feebate" or other redistribute adjustments designed to offset the regressive impacts of rising energy costs, seeking to neutralize the burden-sharing inequity of such policies, they can als…
Transforming Texas-style commodification: Sovereignty, resilience, and energy justice
We examine the 2021 collapse of the Texas electrical grid as a case study of vulnerabilities introduced by the commodification of energy systems. While theories of commodification do predict several of the observed impacts of this experiment in privatization and deregulation of public utilities, we attribute these impacts to a tendentious conception of "Texas-style" sovereignty that is not captured by existing accounts of energy justice. By suppl…
For the trees have no tongues’: Eco-feedback, speech, and the silencing of nature
When Christopher Stone argued for the extension of legal standing to natural objects, he proposed a guardianship model for representing the rights or interests of nonhuman nature. This approach requires that natural objects or systems be able to intelligibly communicate information regarding needs associated with their continued sustainable flourishing. Drawing upon both ‘law beyond the human’ approaches to legal theory and New Materialist theori…
Prepare developed democracies for long-run economic slowdowns
Environmental Justice
This collection of scholarly articles takes as its subject matter discourses on environmental justice. The concept emerged in recent decades as an important framing concept for a wide variety of environmental movements and objectives, and has gained considerable currency due to the scope and normative force that its principles contain, whether in legal, political, or philosophical applications. This collection is an invaluable resource for resear…
Human Rights, Global Justice, or Historical Responsibility? Three Potential Appeals
International Regimes
In international politics, regimes reflect cooperation among states and between states and other actors in an otherwise anarchic arena, and they have in some cases generated powerful institutions capable of influencing the behavior of states and their subjects. Regimes can originate through multilateral treaties, in which they are vested with power by the ratifying states and carry out their functions at the behest of states; but they can also fo…
What Justice Theory and Climate- Change Politics Can Learn from Each Other
Scholars of justice theory often refuse to apply their principles to concrete social or political issues; instead, they develop those principles in abstraction from contemporary value conflicts or policy debates, preferring to remain silent on how justice might inform controversial political decisions. Rawls, for example, casts questions concerning the application of his “justice as fairness” conception across national, generational, and species …
Introductory Note
Recent developments in climate policy have done little to suggest that the world is acting quickly enough to avoid a dangerous rise in global temperatures.Despite some important steps in national policy-making-including the commencement of Australia's carbon pricing mechanism and the piloting of subnational emissions trading in China-the polarized nature of the climate debate in the United States continues to obstruct progress.Moreover, a substan…
Coaxing Climate Policy Leadership
The United States and China have recently been called upon to exercise more leadership in developing an effective international policy response to climate change, but without giving attention to either the risks inherent in taking on such a role or the mechanism by which leading can mobilize others to act in response. Here, I understand leadership as action by a sufficiently powerful actor in a cooperative scheme that is capable of triggering rec…
Stephen M. Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change
Human dignity
If Equity's In, We're Out: Scope for Fairness in the Next Global Climate Agreement
At the United Nations climate change conference in 2011, parties decided to launch the "Durban Platform" to work towards a new long-term climate agreement. The decision was notable for the absence of any reference to "equity," a prominent principle in all previous major climate agreements. Wealthy countries resisted the inclusion of equity on the grounds that the term had become too closely yoked to developing countries' favored conception of equ…
Rethinking Environmentalism: Beyond Doom and Gloom
February 01 2011 Rethinking Environmentalism: Beyond Doom and Gloom Steve Vanderheiden Steve Vanderheiden Steve Vanderheiden is Associate Professor of Political Science and Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Professorial Fellow at the Charles Sturt University Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE) in Canberra, Australia. He is the author of Atmospheric Justice: A Political Theory of Climate Change…
Globalizing Responsibility for Climate Change
Who should pay the costs associated with anthropogenic climate change, how much should they pay, and why? This burden-distribution problem has become the central question of climate justice among scholars and activists, and it remains the primary obstacle to the development of an effective climate regime. The costs are expected to be significant and varied, but can generally be categorized in terms of mitigation —that is, those costs associated w…
Confronting risks: Regulatory Responsibility and Nuclear Energy
The imperatives of contemporary environmental governance require the minimization and/or the redistribution of risk among persons, peoples, and generations, subject to various tradeoffs and based in several key principles of risk distribution. Especially in cases involving manufactured risks, justice requires that states and societies protect their vulnerable from avoidable anthropogenic risk, and this imperative forms the basis for regulatory re…
The politics of energy: An Introduction
Just minutes after the magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck off Japan's northeast coast on the afternoon of 11 March 2011, waves from the 14-meter tsunami that it triggered crashed over the seawalls bui
Allocating Ecological Space
Liberals have long been committed to two axiomatic claims about freedom: that the exercise of control within one's private space epitomizes individual liberty, and that each person must be free to define and pursue the good life for themselves. Together, these claims form a conception of freedom as autonomy (from the Greek Auto-Nomos, giving law to oneself), conceptualized as a personal space in which each can act according to one's own view of t…
Distinguishing Mitigation and Adaptation
Neoliberal Environments: False Promises and Unnatural Consequences
Atmospheric Justice: A Political Theory of Climate Change
Steve Vanderheiden points toward ways to achieve environmental justice by exploring how climate change raises issues of both international and intergenerational justice. In addition, he considers how the design of a global climate regime might take these aims into account.
Oosterveer, Peter, 2007. Global Governance of Food Production and Consumption: Issues and Challenges . Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar
been even stronger. Such criticism, however, is perhaps too tall an order in a research environment that has limited funding for such a large effort. In the end, it is striking the extent to which the chapters hang together as a whole to give us an in-depth analysis of people, coffee, and the environment in Mexico and the Central America while at the same time enabling us to derive lessons and implications far beyond the Western Hemisphere
Two Conceptions of Sustainability
Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees describe the ‘ecological footprint’ (i.e. the ecological capacity, measured in hectares of biologically productive land, needed to supply a given person's consumption of natural resources and absorb their waste) as a conception of environmental sustainability, and have accumulated significant data to measure the footprints of nations, cities and even individual persons. Although the authors refrain from explici…
Radical environmentalism in an age of antiterrorism
This paper examines how antiterrorist laws and rhetoric have targeted the radical environmentalist tactic of ecotage, directing the increased law enforcement powers of the US ‘war on terror’ against this form of resistance and conflating in the public mind a tactic that inflicts only property damage with one that aims its violence against innocent persons. Despite significant differences between ‘eco-terrorism’ and genuine terrorism, this associa…
Understanding Environmental Policy
Eco-terrorism or Justified Resistance? Radical Environmentalism and the 'War on Terror
Radical environmental groups engaged in ecotage-or economic sabotage of inanimate objects thought to be complicit in environmental destruction-have been identified as the leading domestic terrorist threat in the post-9/11 'war on terror.' This article examines the case for extending the conventional definition of terrorism to include attacks not only against noncombatants, but also against inanimate objects, and surveys proposed moral limits sugg…
If Equity's In, We're Out: Scope for Fairness in the Next Global Climate Agreement
At the United Nations climate change conference in 2011, parties decided to launch the "Durban Platform" to work towards a new long-term climate agreement. The decision was notable for the absence of any reference to "equity," a prominent principle in all previous major climate agreements. Wealthy countries resisted the inclusion of equity on the grounds that the term had become too closely yoked to developing countries' favored conception of equ…
Globalizing Responsibility for Climate Change
Who should pay the costs associated with anthropogenic climate change, how much should they pay, and why? This burden-distribution problem has become the central question of climate justice among scholars and activists, and it remains the primary obstacle to the development of an effective climate regime. The costs are expected to be significant and varied, but can generally be categorized in terms of mitigation —that is, those costs associated w…
Two Conceptions of Sustainability
Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees describe the ‘ecological footprint’ (i.e. the ecological capacity, measured in hectares of biologically productive land, needed to supply a given person's consumption of natural resources and absorb their waste) as a conception of environmental sustainability, and have accumulated significant data to measure the footprints of nations, cities and even individual persons. Although the authors refrain from explici…
Radical environmentalism in an age of antiterrorism
This paper examines how antiterrorist laws and rhetoric have targeted the radical environmentalist tactic of ecotage, directing the increased law enforcement powers of the US ‘war on terror’ against this form of resistance and conflating in the public mind a tactic that inflicts only property damage with one that aims its violence against innocent persons. Despite significant differences between ‘eco-terrorism’ and genuine terrorism, this associa…
Assessing the case against the SUV
The sport utility vehicle (SUV) has come under increasing criticism for offences ranging from exacerbating environmental degradation and funding terrorism to fuelling competitive consumption and being a vehicle that Jesus would not drive. Do the charges of made against such vehicles by a burgeoning anti-SUV movement stick, or is the consumer choice of modes of personal transport benign? Is the decision to manufacture, purchase or operate an SUV (…
The politics of energy: An Introduction
Just minutes after the magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck off Japan's northeast coast on the afternoon of 11 March 2011, waves from the 14-meter tsunami that it triggered crashed over the seawalls bui
Distinguishing Mitigation and Adaptation
Coaxing Climate Policy Leadership
The United States and China have recently been called upon to exercise more leadership in developing an effective international policy response to climate change, but without giving attention to either the risks inherent in taking on such a role or the mechanism by which leading can mobilize others to act in response. Here, I understand leadership as action by a sufficiently powerful actor in a cooperative scheme that is capable of triggering rec…
Rethinking Environmentalism: Beyond Doom and Gloom
February 01 2011 Rethinking Environmentalism: Beyond Doom and Gloom Steve Vanderheiden Steve Vanderheiden Steve Vanderheiden is Associate Professor of Political Science and Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Professorial Fellow at the Charles Sturt University Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE) in Canberra, Australia. He is the author of Atmospheric Justice: A Political Theory of Climate Change…
Rousseau, Cronon, and the Wilderness Idea
Habitat Conservation Plans and the Promise of Deliberative Democracy
Recent reforms in U.S. environmental policy have been directed away from traditional command and control regulation or scientific management and toward collaboration and democratic participation in decisionmaking. Evaluating these changes requires attention not only to their effects on environmental protection, but also to the normative aims behind such democratization. This article examines a procedure that allows for collaboratively produced ex…
Rousseau, Cronon, and the Wilderness Idea
One World: The Ethics of Globalization
Missing the forest for the trees: Justice and environmental economics
The field of environmental economics, while offering powerful tools for the diagnosis of environmental problems and the design of policy solutions to them, is unable to effectively incorporate normative concepts like justice or rights into its method of analysis, and so needs to be supplemented by a consideration of such concepts. I examine the two main schools of thought in environmental economics – the New Resource Economics and Free Market Env…
Eco-terrorism or Justified Resistance? Radical Environmentalism and the 'War on Terror
Radical environmental groups engaged in ecotage-or economic sabotage of inanimate objects thought to be complicit in environmental destruction-have been identified as the leading domestic terrorist threat in the post-9/11 'war on terror.' This article examines the case for extending the conventional definition of terrorism to include attacks not only against noncombatants, but also against inanimate objects, and surveys proposed moral limits sugg…
Two Shades of Green: Food and Environmental Sustainability
The politics of food illustrates an enduring tension within environmental ethics and green political theory: the oft-assumed division between those thinkers for whom humanitarian goals remain prominent but who situate them within a normative framework stressing environmental sustainability and those thinkers who reject any distinctively humanitarian interests as untenably anthropocentric. In posing the problem as a moral dilemma between feeding p…
Assessing the case against the SUV
The sport utility vehicle (SUV) has come under increasing criticism for offences ranging from exacerbating environmental degradation and funding terrorism to fuelling competitive consumption and being a vehicle that Jesus would not drive. Do the charges of made against such vehicles by a burgeoning anti-SUV movement stick, or is the consumer choice of modes of personal transport benign? Is the decision to manufacture, purchase or operate an SUV (…
Understanding Environmental Policy
Atmospheric Justice: A Political Theory of Climate Change
Steve Vanderheiden points toward ways to achieve environmental justice by exploring how climate change raises issues of both international and intergenerational justice. In addition, he considers how the design of a global climate regime might take these aims into account.
Oosterveer, Peter, 2007. Global Governance of Food Production and Consumption: Issues and Challenges . Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar
been even stronger. Such criticism, however, is perhaps too tall an order in a research environment that has limited funding for such a large effort. In the end, it is striking the extent to which the chapters hang together as a whole to give us an in-depth analysis of people, coffee, and the environment in Mexico and the Central America while at the same time enabling us to derive lessons and implications far beyond the Western Hemisphere
Two Conceptions of Sustainability
Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees describe the ‘ecological footprint’ (i.e. the ecological capacity, measured in hectares of biologically productive land, needed to supply a given person's consumption of natural resources and absorb their waste) as a conception of environmental sustainability, and have accumulated significant data to measure the footprints of nations, cities and even individual persons. Although the authors refrain from explici…
Radical environmentalism in an age of antiterrorism
This paper examines how antiterrorist laws and rhetoric have targeted the radical environmentalist tactic of ecotage, directing the increased law enforcement powers of the US ‘war on terror’ against this form of resistance and conflating in the public mind a tactic that inflicts only property damage with one that aims its violence against innocent persons. Despite significant differences between ‘eco-terrorism’ and genuine terrorism, this associa…
Allocating Ecological Space
Liberals have long been committed to two axiomatic claims about freedom: that the exercise of control within one's private space epitomizes individual liberty, and that each person must be free to define and pursue the good life for themselves. Together, these claims form a conception of freedom as autonomy (from the Greek Auto-Nomos, giving law to oneself), conceptualized as a personal space in which each can act according to one's own view of t…
Distinguishing Mitigation and Adaptation
Neoliberal Environments: False Promises and Unnatural Consequences
Rethinking Environmentalism: Beyond Doom and Gloom
February 01 2011 Rethinking Environmentalism: Beyond Doom and Gloom Steve Vanderheiden Steve Vanderheiden Steve Vanderheiden is Associate Professor of Political Science and Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Professorial Fellow at the Charles Sturt University Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE) in Canberra, Australia. He is the author of Atmospheric Justice: A Political Theory of Climate Change…
Globalizing Responsibility for Climate Change
Who should pay the costs associated with anthropogenic climate change, how much should they pay, and why? This burden-distribution problem has become the central question of climate justice among scholars and activists, and it remains the primary obstacle to the development of an effective climate regime. The costs are expected to be significant and varied, but can generally be categorized in terms of mitigation —that is, those costs associated w…
Confronting risks: Regulatory Responsibility and Nuclear Energy
The imperatives of contemporary environmental governance require the minimization and/or the redistribution of risk among persons, peoples, and generations, subject to various tradeoffs and based in several key principles of risk distribution. Especially in cases involving manufactured risks, justice requires that states and societies protect their vulnerable from avoidable anthropogenic risk, and this imperative forms the basis for regulatory re…
The politics of energy: An Introduction
Just minutes after the magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck off Japan's northeast coast on the afternoon of 11 March 2011, waves from the 14-meter tsunami that it triggered crashed over the seawalls bui
Introductory Note
Recent developments in climate policy have done little to suggest that the world is acting quickly enough to avoid a dangerous rise in global temperatures.Despite some important steps in national policy-making-including the commencement of Australia's carbon pricing mechanism and the piloting of subnational emissions trading in China-the polarized nature of the climate debate in the United States continues to obstruct progress.Moreover, a substan…
Coaxing Climate Policy Leadership
The United States and China have recently been called upon to exercise more leadership in developing an effective international policy response to climate change, but without giving attention to either the risks inherent in taking on such a role or the mechanism by which leading can mobilize others to act in response. Here, I understand leadership as action by a sufficiently powerful actor in a cooperative scheme that is capable of triggering rec…
Stephen M. Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change
Human dignity
If Equity's In, We're Out: Scope for Fairness in the Next Global Climate Agreement
At the United Nations climate change conference in 2011, parties decided to launch the "Durban Platform" to work towards a new long-term climate agreement. The decision was notable for the absence of any reference to "equity," a prominent principle in all previous major climate agreements. Wealthy countries resisted the inclusion of equity on the grounds that the term had become too closely yoked to developing countries' favored conception of equ…
What Justice Theory and Climate- Change Politics Can Learn from Each Other
Scholars of justice theory often refuse to apply their principles to concrete social or political issues; instead, they develop those principles in abstraction from contemporary value conflicts or policy debates, preferring to remain silent on how justice might inform controversial political decisions. Rawls, for example, casts questions concerning the application of his “justice as fairness” conception across national, generational, and species …
Political science (23 works) · Law (20 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Politics (17 works) · Environmental ethics (16 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Economics (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Law and economics (11 works) · Epistemology (10 works)